Fast-Paced Spread of Frog Fungal Disease Alarms Scientists

[Frog News]

Livescience.com (Utah, USA) June 15th, 2011 09:42 AM: Fast-Paced Spread of Frog Fungal Disease Alarms Scientists

A rapidly spreading, lethal amphibian disease has reached a site bordering the Darien National Park in Panama — the last area in the entire neotropics region to be free of the disease, scientists announced this week.

The disease has been linked to the dramatic population decline and extinction of frog species worldwide.

The infectious fungal disease, called chytridiomycosis, is thought to kill its victims by clogging their skin, essentially suffocating them. And it's at least partly responsible — along with climate change, habitat loss and pollution — for the disappearances of 94 of the 120 frog species thought to have gone extinct since 1980. It has affected amphibians in South America, western North America, Central America, eastern Australia, and Dominica and Montserrat in the Caribbean.

And now it's bumping up against Darien National Park, which is located in eastern Panama and is considered part of the neotropics — tropical highlands of the Americas.

Based on research of the disease's spread in El Cope in western Panama, the researchers say they don't have much time to save frogs in Darien: Within five months of the disease's first case in El Cope, it wiped out 50 percent of the area's frog species and 80 percent of its overall frog population.

"We would like to save all of the species in the Darien, but there isn't time to do that now," Brian Gratwicke, a biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and international coordinator for the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, said in a statement.

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